Software piracy ain't anything new (before there was the Internet and all these fancy P2P piracy, there was the old school Sneakernet kind).

Royal Pingdom blog has a very interesting, blast-from-the-past article about fighting piracy through various copy protection methods, including code wheels, dongles, and feelies. For example:

Dongles

Dongles started appearing in the early 80’s and were used both for games and commercial software of other kinds. The dongle would need to be plugged in to the computer somehow, often through the serial or parallel port. Without the device plugged in, the software wouldn’t run.

The very first program to use a dongle was Wordcraft on the Commodore PET in 1980. Its dongle (the inventor named it so for lack of a better word) connected to the computer’s external cassette port and was two cubic inches large (32 cubic centimeters). We were unfortunately unable to find a picture of it.

These days some software uses USB dongles for copy protection, so we’re not rid of them yet. Dongles are pretty unpopular among users (it’s arguably one of the most hated software protection methods ever), so usually only more specialized and expensive software get away with using them.

Link - via GeekPress (Photo: GamesRadar)

Artwork by Junior Fritz Jacquet, photo by Matthieu Gauchet

Junior Fritz Jacquet is a paper artist unlike any other: his medium of choice is the cardboard core of a toilet paper roll!

Village of Joy has the gallery - via Reality Carnival | Junior's website (no links, strangely) and portfolio (PDF)

Capitalizing on the viral popularity of People of Walmart blog (previously on Neatorama here), there's a new blog called the People of IKEA.

While that's nifty and all, there's an even stranger IKEA phenomenon: Chinese people love to go there, not to shop, but simply to hang around!

With no plans one Saturday, Zhang Xin told his wife, son and mother to wear something smart and hop into the family sedan. He could have taken them to the Forbidden City or the Great Wall, but he decided on another popular destination -- IKEA.

Riding an escalator past a man lying on a display bed with a book opened on his belly, the clan sauntered into the crush of visitors squeezing onto the showroom path, bumping elbows and nicking ankles with their yellow shopping trolleys.

Zhang said the family needed a respite from the smog and a reliable lunch.

"We just came here for fun," said the 34-year-old office manager. "I suppose we could have gone somewhere else, but it wouldn't have been a complete experience."

Welcome to IKEA Beijing, where the atmosphere is more theme park than store.

According to a survey of accident claims by Churchill Car Insurance, computers aren't the only thing computer programmers engineers like to crash - they are also likely to crash their cars ...

Here are the 10 "most likely to crash" occupations:

1. Computer engineer
2. Sales manager
3. Chef
4. Student
5. Doctor
6. Estate agent
7. Surveyor
8. Customer adviser
9. Hairdresser
10. Social worker

In contrast, farmers had the best road safety records based on claims made, followed by aircraft fitters, stores personnel and ambulance drivers.

Link

That reminded me of the classic programmer joke ... from Stack Overflow:

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.

The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed".

The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong".

The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducible?"

Negative Space by Noma Bar

The so-simple-they're-genius artwork of Israeli graphic designer Noma Bar is making the rounds on the Interweb and it's easy to see why. Here are a few selection from his new book Negative Space over at pixelelement: Link | Q&A with Noma at the New Yorker

One of my favorite science comic artists, Jorge Cham of PhD Comics, nailed yet another one with this panel. Incidentally, it is 2AM on the West Coast when I post this one up.

Link | If you're new to PhD Comics, go here for the good stuff

Have you ever gone to your hotel room and thought "hey, this rinky dink room wasn't at all like the photo on the website!" (I'm looking at you, Boston Omni Parker House Hotel). Well, a website named Oyster has stepped up to the task of taking actual honest-to-goodness (not photoshopped for brochures) photos of hotels. Surprisingly, a lot of the hotel rooms - especially the expensive ones I never stay at - are really nice looking, so it's kind of a fun way to gawk at hotels you'd never stay at ...

So far Oyster only has a limited number of hotels in just a few cities* but photos of the one I've stayed at, the Embassy Suites Hotel on Paradise Road in Las Vegas looked exactly like what I remembered. They should step it up a notch and maybe accept user submitted photos (this being Web 2.0 and all).

Link - Thanks Leah!

*Too bad they didn't have photos of the rinky dink room I stayed in at the BOPH - it was literally the size of a closet! And actually the experience is quite useful: whenever I read reviews of a hotel at TripAdvisor, Expedia or similar websites, I always look up the Omni Parker - that way, I can gauge how much of the review is plain BS.

A woman arrived in prison to visit her husband - cue the ominous music - then was led by a leering guard down a dreary hall to the visitor's room. As soon as she sat down, her jailed husband ratcheted up the pressure: did she bring it? Would she do it right then and there for him? Curious inmates began to stare ...

You've won't see an advertisement quite like this on US television (and for McDonald's no less!), but thankfully our partner Very Funny Ads got it: http://www.veryfunnyads.com/?oid=26505&cid=26613

Forget jigsaw puzzles, over at the Neatorama Shop, we've got some really cool (funducational?) 3D Anatomy Models/Puzzles with removable organs. My favorite is of the Woolly Mammoth and the Snail: http://shop.neatorama.com/store.php?anatomy-model-pg1-cid141.html

Image: NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope has got new glasses after astronauts refurbished it in May 2009, and now NASA has kindly released snapshots from the 19-year-old space telescope.

I'm particularly awestruck with this one of the Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped this panoramic view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster.

The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way galaxy. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth. [...]

All of the stars in the image are cozy neighbors. The average distance between any two stars in the cluster's crowded core is only about a third of a light-year, roughly 13 times closer than our Sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Although the stars are close together, WFC3's sharpness can resolve each of them as individual stars. If anyone lived in this globular cluster, they would behold a star-saturated sky that is roughly 100 times brighter than Earth's sky.

I wonder how many of those harbor alien life (seems like a waste if none of them do, don't you think?) ... Link

Why are people so enthralled with today's date? What's so special about 9/9/09? Heather whipps explains over at LiveScience, in which she blames Pythagoras:

Though usually discredited as bogus, numerologists do have a famous predecessor to look to. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and father of the famous theorem, is also credited with popularizing numerology in ancient times.

"Pythagoras most of all seems to have honored and advanced the study concerned with numbers, having taken it away from the use of merchants and likening all things to numbers," wrote Aristoxenus, an ancient Greek historian, in the 4th century B.C.

As part of his obsession with numbers both mathematically and divine, and like many mathematicians before and since, Pythagoras noted that nine in particular had many unique properties.

Link | See also Buzzfeed's Happy 9.9.9 Day!

Six years after the invasion (and subsequent liberation) of Iraq, the country is still too dangerous for normal tourism. This is too bad since Iraq is literally a treasure trove of archaeological artifacts.

To accommodate armchair tourists too timid to risk life and limbs, the Italian government funded the creation of The Virtual Museum of Iraq, showcasing pieces dating from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian eras and more.

Check it out: Link - via Neal Ungerleider's True/Slant blog

Photo: Sharon Fullingim

National Geographic reader Sharon Fullingim took this fantastic photo of a praying mantis catching a hummingbird (and believe it or not, this isn't the first time we've featured such a story). Moral of the story? Don't ever mess with a praying mantis.

From the National Geographic user submitted Daily Dozen (September - Week 1, no direct URL I'm afraid) - Thanks Marilyn!

A friend of Neatoramanaut Andrew Wirtanen snapped this photo of a construction site with a unique screen hiding the building being worked on in Seoul, South Korea. The screen is made entirely out of doors!

A little Googlin' brought another view by waynekorea [Flickr]; this wonderful house made entirely out of old doors in Elberton, Georgia; and this amazing "door/portal" group on Flickr.

Thanks Andrew!

In the long line of stupid criminals featured on Neatorama before, this one is probably the stupidest (and probably loneliest): Stephfon Bennet, 20, allegedly robbed a woman and then returned a couple of hours later ... to ask his victim out on a date!

"We are not exactly sure what he was thinking at the time," said Columbus police Sgt. Sean Laird. "She recognized him right away when he returned and was able to have her cousin call 911."

Officers arrived and arrested Bennett in front of the house, police said.

Link